by Steven Novak
Change is an astounding thing.
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CHAPTER 27
TRAVELING COMPANIONS
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“Stop following me, kid! Getting myself into Ocha is going to be enough of a pain in the ass and the last thing I need is something else to worry about!”
Undeterred by the irritated orders of the tiny winged man, Donald Rondage continued following him through the thick foliage of the Red Forest. The boy had no intention of turning around, and even if he wanted to he wouldn’t have known where to go. The pair had been moving away from the rest of the group for hours, moments after they realized everyone managed to safely survive the Megalot stampede. Having put significant distance between themselves and the others, Donald sincerely doubted he could find his way back to them. For better or worse, Roustaf was taking him to Ocha, whether the little man liked it or not. Coming to a stop while hovering in mid-air, Roustaf turned to face the boy, an obviously annoyed grimace spread across his dark red face.
Floating a few inches from Donald’s nose, Roustaf reached forward with his tiny arm and poked the boy’s forehead with an even tinier finger. “Look in my eyes, kid. Look at the seriousness going on here. I’m not going to tell you again to take off. The longer you insist on following me around, the more likely you are to find yourself on the receiving end of a serious beating.”
Staring at the face of the little man—barely six inches tall, sporting a bushy mustache curled at both ends—Donald found it difficult not to laugh. Swallowing deeply, he turned his head away in an effort to swallow the giggles rapidly forming in his throat. Despite his best efforts, a half-grunt-half-chuckle managed to escape through a crack in his tight lips.
Roustaf did not appreciate this.
Gritting his teeth, the little man dropped the tiny pack from his back and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Oh, I see how it is. You don’t think I can take you, do you? You think your ol’ buddy Roustaf is playing around? Think this is some kind of joke?” Pulling his hands into fists, Roustaf posed them in front of his face and began waving them back and forth, similar to an old-fashioned boxer, “Let me tell you something, twerp: I was knocking the blocks off of punks twice your size when you were still floating around in your mother’s egg sack!”
With the precision of a hummingbird, the tiny man began zipping around Donald’s head, throwing the occasional jab at the air far from the boy’s face. “Come on, kiddo, you want to test me? I’ll be happy to give you a firsthand demonstration of the kind of damage these meat hooks of mine can do! Put yer dukes up, slick!”
“Look, I don’t want to fight you,” Donald responded while rolling his eyes and trying desperately to get some semblance of control over his laughter.
“I thought not. Now that you’ve got an eye-full of these hambones I sometimes call fists, you’re beginning to realize what kind of damage they could do, am I right?”
The young boy’s voice cracked. Placing his hand over his mouth, Donald keeled over, moments away from being overtaken by an army of giggles. “Not exactly, no ….”
“That’s it! Congratulations, slappy, you’ve just succeeded in pushing me over the edge! You really are cruisin’ for a bruisin’, aren’t you? Well, prepare yourself, buddy-boy, because that’s exactly what you’re gonna get! Here comes the pai—”
Hearing something off in the distance, Roustaf stopped. His body went stiff, his hands instantly dropped to his sides. Darting back and forth quickly, his eyes scanned the surrounding forest.
Breathing deeply, he held it for a moment before whispering to Donald, never once taking his eyes off the surrounding trees, “Shhh—did you hear that?”
“What? Hear what? I don’t hear anything,” Donald answered back in between a series of chuckles.
Zooming forward, Roustaf placed the palm of his hand on the crest of the boy’s lips, his voice suddenly reduced to a stern whisper. “Seriously, kid, shut your pie hole. I heard something, over that way.”
Sensing the change in Roustaf’s tone, Donald’s chuckles evaporated backward into his chest where they were first given life. Very slowly, he twisted his body to look in the direction the tiny red man was staring. What he saw was forest—forest and nothing more. Two of the three Fillagrou suns had already set, the third just barely peeking out over the horizon. Visibility was remarkably limited. After forty or so feet, the various trees, leaves and bushes faded drastically away into a wall of black extending onward into eternity. Sailing in from the west, a soft breeze fluttered the fabric of Donald’s shirt, lifting it momentarily off his stomach and tossing his short brown hair gently against his forehead. Very quickly, a deep sense of fear crept underneath his skin and up his back, dragging along the sensitive grooves of his spine.
“I don’t—I don’t hear anything,” The pudgy boy whispered to Roustaf, who was now hovering on transparent wings just a few inches from his face.
The tiny-bodied red man chose not to respond, still unsure if he simply imagined the noise, yet not wanting to take any chances. “Stay here,” He murmured, cautiously hovering forward toward the darkness.
Donald decided to heed the advice, keeping his feet firmly planted in the damp soil underneath. For two full minutes, Roustaf continued to carefully float away from the boy before eventually disappearing from view, swallowed by the darkness. Donald now found himself alone with the silence of the Red Forest. Upon his first visit here he took note of how remarkably quiet this place was; beyond the breeze, and the rustle of leaves, there was no sound. No insects squeaking, no birds chirping, no running water or noises of any kind. It wasn’t until this very moment, though, that he realized just how incredibly frightening the absence of sound could be.
After nearly five minutes of unrelenting silence came a noise, faintly pushing its way through the nothingness. Similar to a scream or a yelp, the clamor was far away, yet growing stronger with every passing moment.
Whatever was causing it was rapidly getting closer.
Slowly Donald began to step backward, dead, gray branches crunching underneath the soles of his worn and dirty gym shoes. Coming to a momentary stop, he craned his head forward while twisting his ear in the direction of the noise. Slowly, the subtle noise was morphing into something slightly more recognizable, something that sounded strangely like Roustaf. Refocusing his attentions, Donald could clearly make out the word, “kid” followed by some gibberish and finished off with what sounded like it could possibly be “shrimp” or “twerp” or something similar in nature. It was definitely Roustaf. In a matter of moments, the noise again rose in volume, transforming into a full-on scream and leading Donald to believe that the little man was moving in his direction at an incredible speed. Instantly, he resumed his backward steps. Blasting from the darkness so fast that he was barely visible, tiny Roustaf whizzed past Donald’s head, leaving in his wake a blast of wind that caused the boy’s hair to scatter wildly.
At the top of his tiny lungs, the little man bellowed, “Run!”
Overcome with fear, Donald watched as Roustaf disappeared once more into the darkness of the trees. From the spot where he originally emerged came a deep, guttural, slimy roar that sounded sort of like a lion attempting to growl while underwater, and somehow succeeding. Meshed with the awful sound of crackling branches and something sounding vaguely like a wet slab of beef being smacked against the side of a tree, the horrifying clatter sent reverberations through the ground beneath the boy’s feet, nearly causing him to topple over. The pace of Donald’s backward movement sped to a jog, then quickly advanced to a sprint. All at once, the darkened tree line opened up, launching something garish, unpleasant and wholly dangerous from its bosom.
Something was rapidly advancing on the position of the pudgy Donald Rondage at an incredible pace: something looking to end his journey to Ocha before it even began.
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CHAPTER 28
BEST KEPT SECRETS
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&nb
sp; At some point after his last session with the Ochan interrogators, Pleebo faded into unconsciousness. The pain associated with the endless broken bones, welts and cuts now covering the majority of his body simply overloaded his senses and became too much for his brain to process, which instead chose to simply shut down. In a sleep as deep as this, there were no dreams and there was no sound. In this state existed only a funnel of black, extending downward into a nothingness that swallowed whole the ideas of matter, gravity and perception. In this world, Pleebo was weightless and pain-free; in this place nothing could hurt him, because he ceased to exist. How simple it would have been for him to remain here, free of the complexities of war, free of the death and the sadness …how wonderfully simple it would have been to at last give up.
Unfortunately for Pleebo, fate abhors simplicity.
Rolling in from the surrounding nothingness came the faint crackle of a woodless flame, coaxing him back to reality. Momentarily fluttering, his sore eyelids at last began to open, despite their best efforts to remain closed. Having not felt a single cooling drop of water in weeks, his cracked lips parted, tiny droplets of blood seeping from the newly ruptured skin. The stone floor pressed against his face was cold and unforgiving. Little by little, his enormous red pupils began to adjust to the darkness of the room around him, focusing on the soft blue light sprouting from the profound black less than ten feet away. At this point, Pleebo realized he was no longer in his cell. The smell of the new surroundings seeped into his senses, stiff, dusty and cavernous, thick like a vat of quicksand. Something grabbed hold of his broken arm, dragging him forward across the stone and toward the blue glow. Too weak to resist, Pleebo allowed his body to go limp. Wherever he was, whoever was tugging at him, he was totally and completely at their mercy. Less than a foot from the soft blue flicker, his broken, horizontal body again came to a stop. Spread out on his back, unable to move his head more than a few inches in either direction, Pleebo stared up at the ceiling, his eyes watching soft blue flickers of light dance playfully on the brick ceiling. One by one, seven cloaked figures converged on his point of view, their faces hidden behind the deep black shadows created by their dusty hoods. Cast in frightening silhouette, the creatures more closely resembled amorphous shapes than actual living, breathing things. These were shadows given dimension, and nothing more.
As a group the seven shadows began to speak. “The doorway, we require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
On the inside, under the welts of a thousand blows, Pleebo laughed. For weeks he had been asked this very same question. For weeks he had successfully avoided answering. Surely at this point the Ochans must have begun to realize that they weren’t going to get anything from him. Having survived every single implement of torture one could dare dream into reality, Pleebo could scarcely think of anything else they might do to him.
Again came the collected voice of the seven shadows. “The doorway. We require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
The unison tone of the shapes was deep, yet far away, almost breathy in its sharpness. “The doorway …we require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
Closing his eyes, Pleebo forced an awkward, broken smile onto his face. Through a sandy cough, he chuckled, sending sharp pains across his numerous broken ribs. “If I didn’t tell—the four-hundred—pound guy with muscles for days anything …what—what—what makes you think—I’m going to tell you?”
The shadows ignored his remarks and simply repeated their ghastly credo: “The doorway …we require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
Without warning, Pleebo’s blurry, tired brain began to figure out that the living shadows were the conjurers, and they actually weren’t speaking to him at all. In fact, their disgusting lips weren’t even moving. Somehow, these things were inside his head.
One after another, from below their filthy robes, the wrinkled, scaly hands of the creatures emerged. Reaching forward, one bony appendage grabbed hold of the one to its immediate left, slowly forming a circle around Pleebo’s shattered form.
“The doorway …we require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
The telepathic chant of the one-group was coming much closer in succession now, the volume rising in sync with the pace. Previously gazing upward, the darkened shadows of their heads now moved toward Pleebo. Glowing eyes like milky glass emerged from the shadows, staring intently at the body of the near dead Fillagrou sprawled across the stone.
“The doorway …we require the location of the hundredth doorway.”
All at once, an ungodly chill pierced Pleebo’s chest, causing his muscles to pull tight while slamming his remaining teeth together like a pair of rigid stones being smacked together. Rapidly, the awful cold began spreading along his organs, instantly freezing them in place. Moving into his neck, the agonizing sensation constricted his air passages, and creeping upward further, it locked his jaw into a ghastly open-mouth position. Firmly intertwined with the dark magic coursing through his body, Pleebo realized that he had failed. These creatures, these hideous shadows with their glowing eyes, would get the information they desired, and he could do nothing to stop them. Moments before the icy blanket enveloped his brain entirely, Pleebo recalled with much sadness the faces of Tommy, Staci, Nicky and his sister Zanell. He’d failed them. Despite his best efforts, despite having been able to withstand more than he ever dreamt possible, he’d failed them. With the disgusting, bitter-cold magic now seeping between the folds in the brownish-gray matter of his brain, a barely noticeable tear leaked from the corner of Pleebo’s eye. Almost instantly it froze to his cheek.
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CHAPTER 29
THE GREAT SNAGGLEWORM ENCOUNTER
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His chest on fire as he struggled to catch his breath, Donald Rondage darted through the darkening forest at full speed. Not far behind him, a monster at least twenty feet tall with a segmented body similar to a caterpillar slithered across the forest floor with surprising speed. The bizarre creature growled into the night air through a mouth filled with jagged teeth that were bent grotesquely in every conceivable direction at the tip of its wormlike body. The noise immediately sent a shiver down Donald’s spine. Though he could hear the sloshing of the creature’s moist flesh as it wiggled through the blackness behind him, never once did he turn to look in its direction; he couldn’t. Instead his eyes focused on what lay in front and what rested beneath. Every step on the uneven, debris-covered ground was a potentially dangerous one. Donald was keenly aware that a single misstep could plant him face down in the dirt, leaving him easy pickings for the slimy, snarling worm with the rancid hot breath singeing the hairs on the back of his neck. Again the monster roared hungrily, its massive body smacking into the gray trunks of trees with sickening wet thuds and nearly snapping the thick, ages-old shafts to timbers. While trying to worm its way through a pair of particularly tight trees, the beast became momentarily stuck. Shaking violently from side to side, attempting to work itself free and failing, it could only howl in frustration. Coming to a sliding stop, Donald dropped his hands to his knees and bent over to catch his breath. Glancing briefly behind him, he could see the massive, drooling creature wedged in place, unable to shake itself loose. Its head whipped wildly, thick greenish mucus flipping from its hungry jaws.
“That’ll teach you, you ugly bastard,” Donald mumbled between heavy breaths, his heart pounding and his limbs sore.
Emerging from the darkness in the opposite direction, Roustaf came to a hovering stop alongside the boy’s head, looking noticeably tired himself. “I suggest you stop gloating and keep running, slick.”
“What are you talking about?” Donald answered, at last able to stand upright, though his chest remained on fire. “That thing is wedged in there good, aint’ going nowhere.”
Roustaf sighed deep. “Oh really? You’ve dealt with Snaggleworms before, have you? Seen this happen a lot? Have a lot of experience in this area?”
Do
nald shot the tiny man an angry glare. “No, but come on, look at it. I may not know anything about Snagglesquirms—”
“Worms. Snaggleworms.”
“Whatever. The point is that thing is stuck in there pretty damn good.” Reaching down, Donald picked a rock off the forest floor and whipped it at the slimy beast’s face. “See? Earthworm Jim isn’t going anywhere.”
Running his hand over the top of his sweaty head, Roustaf sighed deeply, the sound of the Snaggleworm’s wild thrashing growing louder with every passing second, angered further by the rock that had just hit it in the face. Reaching down he snagged a handful of Donald’s shirt, trying his best to tug the boy in the opposite direction. Considering the massive size difference between the two, he wasn’t having much success.
“Trust me kid, it’s in our best interest to skedaddle while we still have a chance,” Roustaf stated more sternly, the enormous, slimy creature snarling and snapping at the pair of them from twenty feet away.
Reaching out, Donald snatched the tiny man in a single movement, wrapping him tightly between his fingers. “Listen, you little jerk—I don’t know if you noticed, but we don’t all have the luxury of flying around without a care in the world like Tinkerbell with a mustache. My legs hurt, I’m tired, and I need to catch my breath!” Pulling Roustaf close to his face, he poked the little man’s head with the tip of his finger. “That ugly bastard back there is stuck! It’s not going anywhere! Now give me two freakin’ seconds to catch my breath and then we’ll get the hell out o—”
From behind the pair came the sound of snapping trees, of ancient wood torn to pieces, followed immediately by a mushy, wet growl so loud that it shook loose nearby foliage.
